WbSrch, the Independent Search Engine, Expands

Share Article

Independent search engine adds servers to fuel growth.

WbSrch, an independent search engine based in Oregon, has expanded its data center, growing from a single dedicated server to three.

Founder Jason Champion had this to say about the expansion:

“We've grown enough that a single server no longer meets our needs. Tripling our footprint will allow us to continue growing and improving our algorithms throughout 2016.

We chose colocating servers over cloud hosting like EC2 because we're running a very RAM-intensive operation. Most cloud hosting companies make their profits on memory, so once you go beyond a certain point, it's much less expensive to host your own servers.

Our hosting provider, Opus Interactive, has been great. Their price, quality of service, and reliability has enabled us to continue improving our algorithms without worrying too much about infrastructure costs, and they have plenty of rack space available if we need to grow quickly.”

Started in 2013 and launched in 2014, WbSrch is still quite young, with an index of 10 million pages grouped into more than 30 languages. Traffic has been steadily increasing as the index grows and algorithms improve.

Rather than trying to crawl and index every page on the web, WbSrch aims to build quality results by weighing what is excluded just as heavily as what is included. More than 500,000 domains have been excluded, based primarily on content language and a few other criteria. The number of crawled pages, indexed keywords, and excluded sites is published on the site.